It’s easy to mistake maintenance for practice.

Practicing a skill involves being mindful about what is currently on or past the edge of your ability, and actively working to bring those ‘edge’ topics in closer to your zone of comfort. There’s usually an element of pain with practice, because it’s by definition uncomfortable. It can also look boring to the outside observer.

Maintenance on the other hand, is doing the activity but in the absence of practice. It’s more mindless, comfortable, and less painful.

To use guitar playing as an example, practice can look like drilling scales, chords and using a metronome to improve how fast you can play. Maintenance might just look like having fun jamming to the usual riffs you usually play.

I think it’s easy to forget what practice feels like, once you leave childhood. Most of us get exposed to practice as children via school or extracurricular activities (e.g. music lessons), where this usually happens under supervision of a teacher who guides the process.

After leaving school and entering adulthood, there are fewer external forces putting you in situations where you explicitly practice. The responsibility moves to you to either facilitate your own practice, or invest in a teacher to help with that.

Work generally doesn’t involve practice in my experience. Yes, there is an element of short term practice as you onboard, but this isn’t the same as real long term practice. In my experience, learning tends to saturate at some point once you have the skills to do your job. And the practice ends there.

So if you’re working on a skill, keep in mind – are you actually practicing? Or just maintaining?

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I was thinking about this because I realized that through my livestreams, operating systems development has been one of the first things in a long time that I’ve actually practiced. Every week I’ve logged on, and pushed my boundaries in at least one small way. And over years, the small steps add up and there has absolutely been a marked improvement, not so different from when I took music lessons as a kid.

This contrasts to years of pure maintenance work in other areas that I mistook for practice, like years of the aforementioned guitar jamming, while my skills slowly flatlined (and later regressed), and also years of slow electronic music production progress where I made songs, but without much intentionality for actively improving weak points. Looking back, I consider not finding a teacher a major under-investment, given how much I cared I about that at the time.

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This post was inspired by some tweets on this topic from Cortland Allen (@csallen).